Our Underpinning Principles for Assessment
1. Assessment puts the child at the centre of learning.
2. Assessment is at the heart of high quality teaching which leads to high quality learning for all pupils, which leads to good progress.
3. Assessment is honest, fair, consistent and compares results to both local and national standards.
4. Assessment provides feedback which recognises effort and suggests next steps towards deep and meaningful learning.
5. Assessment is appropriate, manageable and purposeful.
6. Assessment sets consistently high expectations for all learners.
7. Assessment outcomes provide meaningful and understandable information.
Children take the Reception Baseline assessment when they have settled into school. This will be used as a progress measure in the future and the children reach Year 6.
Pupils do not ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ the assessment; it provides a snapshot of where they are when they start school in the reception year. The results of the assessment will not be used by government to track or label individual pupils, or to judge the performance of early years settings. We will use the data from the assessment to create a baseline for school-level progress measures for primary schools. This will show the progress pupils make from reception until the end of key stage 2 in year 6.
At the end of reception, parents receive information on their child's attainment in relation to the Early Learning Goals. This is reported directly to parents and forms part of the annual report.
Pupils are formally tested in Reading, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, and Mathematics. This is a designated week in May. Writing assessment is teacher assessed against a specific criterion. This is a secure fit model, i.e., if your child cannot write neat, legibly and joined then they are likely to not meet the writing expectation.
All national testing is reported to parents/carers.
